


Shut Up Kiss Me

by goodoldfashioned



Category: RedLetterMedia RPF
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Caretaking, Cold Weather, Denial, Implied Past Jay/OCs, Loyalty, M/M, Protectiveness, Sharing Clothes, Subdrop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:01:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29909751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodoldfashioned/pseuds/goodoldfashioned
Summary: Jay calls Mike and asks if he wants to hang out at one o’clock in the morning. No big deal. No reason.
Relationships: Mike/Jay
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	Shut Up Kiss Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnnInymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnInymouse/gifts).



> A birthday fic for AnnInymouse, your friendship means so much to me and I hope your birthday is wonderful!! <3 <3
> 
> This is about the Half in the Baaaaaaaag characters and their world only.
> 
> *

When Jay blinked awake on an unfamiliar couch, shivering in his underwear and not sure where he was, his first thought was that he was too old for this, even before he’d gathered his wits enough to remember what ‘this’ was. 

“What,” he said, groping for his clothes, which were not in reach. He could sense he wasn’t alone in this dimly lit room and was afraid to turn over. ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ was playing on what sounded like an expensive sound system and he could smell pot, also something like corn chips that he didn’t think was actually corn chips. 

“Hey, man,” a woman said, and Jay rolled over to blink at her. She was slumped on an armchair across from the couch where he’d awakened, twirling a remote control around in her hand. The details of her appearance came to him slowly, as if through a fog: she was small with dark hair and an unfriendly expression, and the only thing she was wearing appeared to be some kind of bath mat made of fur that was draped over her front. “You okay?” she asked, like he had better be, because it wasn’t her problem if he wasn’t. 

Jay nodded, his gaze shifting over to the naked guy sitting beside her, then quickly away. He’d had sex with that guy earlier in the night, and two other guys, and a different woman had been there giving them all orders. This mean-eyed woman in the bath mat thing was new to him, which was the most alarming part of all of this, because it wasn’t typical of him to lose count of how many people showed up, even if he never knew any of them or planned to see any of them again.

“You sorta freaked out,” the naked guy said, without looking at Jay directly as he gathered his clothes from where someone had draped them over the far end of the couch. “Or, uh. Shut down, I guess. We let you sleep it off, but you gotta get out of here, man.” 

“I am,” Jay said, already pulling on his hooded sweatshirt while his sluggish heart started to beat faster. He’d had a t-shirt, too, but he couldn’t see it anywhere, so fuck it, though it had been one of his favorites, a limited edition print. He shouldn’t have been stupid enough to wear it to one of these parties. “Fuck,” he said, remembering how far the drive to this place had been, way out in the middle of nowhere, and now it was dark out. He wasn’t drunk, never allowed himself a single beer or drag from a joint at these things, but he felt-- Off. Weird, bad. It was fucked up that he’d fallen asleep. That had never happened before.

When he stood to step into his jeans he winced with the need to take a leak, but he wasn’t going to ask to use these people’s bathroom. He had to leave, was violating protocol by still being here, and his thoughts felt partially underwater in a way that made him wonder again if he was even okay to drive. 

“Where’s my coat?” he asked, turning back to the couple on the armchair. The room they were in was a large den with a corner fireplace where a few embers from the fire that had been going earlier still emitted a low heat, and the big windows that lined the back wall were all uncovered, nothing visible outside but empty country darkness and the faint glow of the highway in the distance. The corn chip smell was the stale scent of sex, Jay realized, and he felt like he was going to puke when cold lube trickled from between his ass cheeks into his boxers. At least it wasn’t come. He hadn’t been that gone, and even if he had been the woman who was giving the orders would have enforced the condom rule. He’d definitely sucked some dick without one, but the administrators who ran this club vetted everybody’s medical clearances before events. Every time he signed up for one of these meetups, Jay had to submit updated waivers testifying to the state of his health that he wasn’t sure were legally binding, but which were designed to scare everybody into taking this seriously. He appreciated the cold, professional tone of the whole pre-event arrangement procedure, and wondered if he’d get his profile flagged for being weird and falling asleep. 

They found his coat, and Jay assured them he was fine to drive, though it felt like a lie. He still had to pee, worse now, but he’d find some place to stop along the highway. 

“Maybe take it easy on yourself,” said the woman holding the fur bath mat thing against her otherwise naked body as she saw him out. “You were, like, goin’ through something, for a minute there.” 

“I’m okay,” Jay said, humiliated by the thought of whatever he’d done or said to give her that impression. His eyes and cheeks felt raw in a way that made him fear there had been crying involved. He was already halfway down the house’s front stairs, not sure how the woman could stand to linger in the open doorway with nothing on. Even in his coat, he was curled in on himself against the cold as he headed for his car on the gravel driveway. It was March, old snow piled everywhere, thick clouds blocking out the moon. The house’s front porch light was the only illumination for miles.

Jay threw himself behind the wheel of his car, locked the door behind him, and silently begged the engine to turn over when he reached for the ignition. He’d had issue after issue with the car recently, needed to face the fact that he’d have to buy a new one that he couldn’t really afford, and if he had to go back and knock on the door to ask for a jump start he was pretty sure he’d break down in some kind of real way and wouldn’t be able to get home without help. When the car started, he almost sobbed with relief. The last thing he wanted to do right then was ask for help. He peeled out of the driveway and back toward his real life before the car’s heater had even kicked in. 

Not that these interludes weren't part of his real life, too. He just didn’t usually wake up in the midst of them feeling like he’d found himself on an alien planet. These hookups were about both losing and maintaining control, and if he couldn’t strike the right balance he sometimes felt like this after: skinned, exposed, desperate to crawl under a pile of blankets and hide, like a kid who’d hoped to get scared and had gotten too much of what he’d wanted.

He put the radio on to help himself stay awake and craned his neck over the dash to make sure he wasn’t about to hit a deer or a tree as he navigated his way back to the main road. This was some kind of farm out past Waukesha, and the pitch black two-lane highway he was headed toward would bring him back to I-94. At least it wasn’t snowing. The posting on the club’s members-only weekly listings had said this was an opportunity to ‘interact’ with a dom and her regular ‘harem’ of guys. Jay had liked the dom lady, but couldn’t remember where the bath mat lady had come in. He’d been blindfolded for part of it. That must have been where he lost track of himself. 

It was well after midnight and he passed no open businesses, not even a gas station. After twenty minutes he couldn’t take it anymore and had to pull over on the side of the road to piss, exposing his dick to the kind of frigid cold that made him fear it would freeze off before he could empty his bladder. He’d had gloves, too, but those were left behind along with his t-shirt. His hands were shaking as he zipped himself back up and turned for the car, and a crunching metal sound in the distance made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. His thoughts were swimmy and he couldn’t get warm, even when he was back behind the wheel and hunched forward with the heat on full blast. 

He felt wretched and smelled weird, and was having a moment of wondering why he ever did any of this, though he knew he’d want it again in a few weeks, or maybe a few months. His habit of seeking out elaborately staged anonymous sex was like his obsession with horror. Just as few things in movies were able to scare or shock him anymore, it was hard to truly get him excited unless it was dark, twisted, and at least held the appearance of danger. He needed the scary parts to feel real, or nothing about the experience would reach him the way he wanted it to. It was about being able to forget, on some primal level, that he was actually safe, and just like he had when he watched horror movies with his friends as a kid, he always wanted to show everybody that he wasn’t actually scared or even affected, at least not as much as they were. This was especially true when he was actually freaked out. Part of the thrill was in hiding his moments of weakness even from the people who were going through the experience with him. He got off most of all on taking whatever they dished out and never breaking.

Which was why he felt fucked up all the way home and couldn’t stop trembling. He’d blown it with that group, let the mask slip, and though he’d likely never see any of those people again, it was bothering him. 

He told himself to get over it like he always did and that making it back to his apartment was proof that he was actually fine. He didn’t even let himself linger in the shower for as long as he wanted to, and only brushed his teeth for an extra thirty seconds. He remembered everything up to a point: that the dom was shockingly pretty in a way that made him nervous at first, that he was one of two guys not in the ‘harem’ who’d shown up, and that he was the smallest guy there by a lot. That part wasn’t rare and didn’t normally bother him, but tonight it had, eventually. Following the lead of the dom who’d declared Jay ‘cute’ in a pitying tone, they’d all made him the center of attention in a way that he’d liked, until he lost the plot and maybe liked it less.

In bed, he theorized that it had to do with his age. He was forty, and a lot of the people at these things were still in their mid-twenties or early thirties, the way he had been when he found this scene. The women tended to be a little older, but he was starting to regularly be the oldest of the guys, in a way that hadn’t mattered when he looked young for his age, which maybe he still did, but something about getting railed by guys who weren’t just bigger than him but also younger than him didn’t feel fair. He was never the one who did the railing, because he didn’t want to put that kind of embarrassingly blunt energy into sex, which had seemed smart to him once but suddenly felt so pathetic that he couldn’t get his throat to stop closing up while he shivered under a pile of blankets that weren’t keeping the cold out. 

He couldn’t sleep. He sat up and groaned, dragged his still-shaky hands over his face and then through his damp hair. His phone was charging on the bedside table, and when he picked it up he told himself he was just going to check the time. It was ten minutes past one in the morning. He opened Twitter, and after five minutes of scrolling felt worse about everything, including the fact that a guy who actually wanted to date him had DM’d him two days ago and he still hadn’t responded, because he didn’t want to date the guy but also didn’t want to lose him as a friend. 

He’d tried dating in his twenties and missed absolutely nothing about it. He’d also tried just jerking off and watching porn rather than looking for sex with other people, but that wasn’t enough in the long run. This was what worked for him, until it didn’t, but next time maybe it would, the way it had when he was younger. 

He wanted to talk to someone, just to distract himself from his own spiralling thoughts, but part of being old now was that everyone he actually knew well enough to talk to would be asleep. Except, possibly, the only other person he knew who was secretly fucked up and still dysfunctional into his forties. 

He thought of texting, but his thumbs felt too clumsy to type anything that wouldn’t expose him as someone who’d cried pitiful sex tears earlier in the evening, so he just jammed one of them against Mike’s name on his contact list and hit the phone call icon, figuring Mike would either pick up, drunk, or miss the call and make fun of him later. Jay could say he butt-dialed or something. Mike was somebody he could be almost shameless with, anyway.

Mike didn’t answer. This plunged Jay ten thousand leagues deeper into how shitty he felt. The unexpectedness of his reaction made it worse, as if Mike had ever promised to be there for him. He stared down at his phone with what he knew was a look of betrayal on his face. 

Maybe if he just went over there, he thought, already getting out of bed. What did Mike have going on that was superior to sitting next to Jay and listening to him ramble about something inconsequential until this feeling passed? Mike hardly ever slept around in his own nondiscriminating way anymore, at least that Jay could see. It was Saturday, so they didn’t have a shift tomorrow, and Mike never bothered to make it to the VCR repair shop on time anyway. He was technically the manager, which Jay had resented for a full decade, though not enough to do anything about it, like leave. 

Jay was dressed to go over to Mike’s place and trying to talk himself out of it when his phone rang, Mike calling. 

“Hello?”

“Did you just call me.” Mike sounded half asleep and annoyed. 

“No,” Jay said, not even sure why. He couldn’t control what was coming out of his mouth, it seemed, and couldn’t believe he was on the phone with his co-worker and sort of best friend sort of nemesis while he was feeling like this, as if involving Mike had ever done anything but make things worse for him. 

“Yeah, you did,” Mike said after a pause, apparently too tired to play games. “Where are you?”

“At home. Where else would I be.”

“You sound fucking-- Weird, Jay.”

“No, I don’t. What? Like, how?”

“Like-- Data.”

“Like what?”

“Like a robot. Like a human playing a robot on Star Trek. Why’d you call me? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Do you, um. Do you feel like hanging out, though? I can’t sleep.”

Mike made a noise that may have been shock or exasperation. Jay’s heart was pounding again. He felt like he was in a horror movie where the rule was that if you couldn’t get someone who actually knew you to spend time with you, the killer would get you. 

“Right now?” Mike said. 

“Uh-huh. Sorry-- Never mind--”

“No, it’s fine. Come over. I can’t drive, so you have to come here.” 

“That’s okay, I’m sober. Okay, bye.” 

Jay hung up and threw the phone on the bed like it was a bloodied murder weapon. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Was he actually going over to Mike’s? He looked around at his silent apartment and felt the walls pushing in closer, the emptiness of the place transforming into something invisible but real that was coming to get him. He grabbed the phone again, ready to do more damage with this weapon if he had to. 

It was colder in Milwaukee than it had been out in the country, or anyway that was how it felt as he headed toward his car, still buttoning up his coat. He’d forgotten his hat and scarf and was newly mad at himself for losing his gloves. Something about leaving things at the scenes of his hookups made him feel cheated and even a little victimized, as if the point of the whole thing had been for those people to take some part of him that he didn’t want to give. He knew it was childish, that it was his own fault for forgetting his stuff, but at the moment knowing that just made him feel worse.

Mike’s house was only five minutes away by car. In nicer weather Jay would have walked, and he felt like his curbside parking job was bad when he got there, like he couldn’t do anything right. He checked his eyes in the rearview to make sure he didn’t look like he’d bawled them out earlier. It probably hadn’t been anything that dramatic, because he already looked normal, if also pale and tired and old. 

Mike also looked pale, tired, and old, but in a familiar, cozy way that surrounded Jay like the warmth that had been eluding him since he woke up in his underwear on that stranger’s couch. They locked eyes for a possibly awkward amount of time while Jay stood outside of Mike’s door and Mike stood just inside it, wearing a bathrobe and white socks. 

“Did you kill someone?” Mike asked, sounding like he was bored by the concept, as if it was a repeating pattern of behavior for Jay and he’d dealt with it before.

“No,” Jay said. “What?”

“You never ask to hang out with me, Jay. Not even on a Friday after work.”

“Yes, I do. Can I come in or not? It’s freezing.” 

“Sure, but you’re wrong. I’m always the one who asks.”

Jay shook his head and stepped inside, ducking under Mike’s arm, which was braced on the doorframe. Mike’s house smelled surprisingly good, like melted chocolate and roasted marshmallows. There were cracker crumbs on the countertops in his tiny kitchen.

“Were you making stovetop s’mores?” Jay asked when Mike turned from doing up the locks on his front door. 

“No,” Mike said, glowering like he had been and he didn’t like that Jay had caught him. “I was asleep.” 

“Sorry I woke you.”

“You don’t look sorry. Do you want a beer? What are we doing? Should I put a movie on or something?”

Jay shook his head and found his voice was gone. He wasn’t emotional or anything, he just felt drained down to nothing. He knew watching a movie would just be an invitation to let his thoughts consume him while he zoned out and Mike fell asleep. 

“Hey,” Mike said, frowning again before his expression softened. He walked closer, until he was towering over Jay, who stared at Mike’s chest. “What’s the matter?” Mike asked, mumbling this under his breath in a way that made all the words meld together.

“Nothing,” Jay managed to get out, shrugging in a violent little jerk of his shoulders. Mike smelled good, too, like the sweets he’d been eating and faintly of sweat in a way that reminded Jay of working alongside him. “I need, like. A project. Can we, um. Clean your kitchen, or something?”

Mike looked at Jay like he was insane, then looked worried again.

“My kitchen’s already clean,” he said.

“It’s visibly not.”

“Jay--”

“How about, um-- Those DVDs!” Jay pointed frantically at the messy piles of them at the foot of a bookcase that was overflowing with them, cases stacked everywhere. “You’re always saying you can’t find what you’re looking for, ‘cause there’s no system. Can we organize them? Could we do that, like. Please?”

Mike gave Jay a searching look, like he was trying to figure out how exactly this was a joke at his expense. As if Mike was the one who fell for jokes, or Jay the one who played them.

“Okayyy,” Mike said, slowly. “Knock yourself out, I guess. But I’m also gonna have a beer. You want one?”

“I’ll just have some of yours,” Jay said, already darting for the DVDs as he yanked his coat off. 

Jay was sorting DVDs by genre by the time Mike returned to the living room, now wearing flannel lounge pants and a t-shirt instead of the robe, carrying a beer. It was warm in his apartment, to the point that Jay was sweating a little under his hoodie. He held his hand out without looking, and Mike passed the beer bottle into it. 

“Thanks,” Jay said, passing it back after taking a swig. He wasn’t sure why it felt so good to share a drink with Mike right now, but it did. “Wow, I didn’t know you had this,” he said, holding up a copy of _Making Mr. Right_ , which they’d watched together about fifteen years ago while high. 

“Are you kidding?” Mike said. He was seated on the couch with his legs tipped open wide in Jay’s direction, which from where Jay was kneeling on the floor felt intentional in a way he didn’t actually mind. “It’s my favorite John Malkovich movie.”

“That’s insane,” Jay said, grinning. “It is pretty great, though,” he said, turning it over to read the back of the case. “It’s so, like, cheerfully stupid.” 

“Put that in the cheerfully stupid pile, then. Filed under C.” 

“That’s ridiculous. It’s going on the comedy shelf. Do you want me to make labels? I have a label maker at home.” 

“Of course you do.”

Jay felt better already, smiling to himself and laughing at titles as he made his way through Mike’s collection. Mike was smiling, too, but he still had an edge of worry in his expression whenever their eyes met. He let Jay drink half his beer without complaining, which almost never happened. 

When the beer was finished, Mike lowered himself to the floor beside Jay with a grunt and started to help him sort through the DVDs. They debated what the genre should be for certain titles, and Jay’s mind was blissfully clear of anything but organizing the collection correctly. Mike’s company had this ability to take him away from the rest of the world and leave him hyper-focused on their conversations in a way that so far was unmatched in Jay’s life. That was why he’d wanted to be with Mike, and why he was desperate to stay even after the entire collection was alphabetized and rearranged on the shelves, with the large sci-fi contingent set aside in alphabetical order, to be installed on a new bookshelf that they would go look for together at the thrift store tomorrow, on their day off. 

“Jesus,” Mike said, hoisting himself to his feet while Jay lingered on the floor, feeling exhausted and unable to move. “It’s four in the morning.”

“Yeah.” Jay braced himself for the bad feelings that he’d avoided but not defeated. He kept picturing what he must have looked like in that living room, blubbering tears behind a blindfold with a dick in his mouth. 

“What’s with you?” Mike asked, leaning down to snap his fingers in front of Jay’s face. “Did something happen?”

“No.” Jay grabbed Mike’s hand and used it to pull himself up. Mike looked surprised but let Jay do it, and didn’t drop his hand after he was standing. “Can I sleep here?” Jay asked. 

“Yeah,” Mike said. They both looked at the couch, and Jay let go of Mike’s hand, remembering what it had felt like to wake up alone on that other one and not know exactly how he got there, except that he did. “C’mon,” Mike said, tilting his head toward the bedroom. “I’m too tired to make up the couch.” 

Jay followed him without a word, his ears getting hot with gratitude. He sat on Mike’s unmade bed and took off his boots while Mike pawed through one of the drawers in his dresser. 

“Here,” Mike said, tossing a thermal shirt into Jay’s lap without looking at him. “If you don’t want to sleep in your hoodie.” 

“Thanks,” Jay said. The thing would be enormous on him. He took his hoodie off without thinking about the fact that he didn’t have an undershirt on, and hurriedly pulled the thermal shirt over his head. It smelled like Mike, only cleaner. “Should I take off my jeans?” he asked, staring down at his socked feet.

He looked up when Mike had no response except to stand there looking confused. The heat on Jay’s ears spread down to his throat and across his cheeks. He shouldn’t be here while he was still fragmented like this, wanting someone to tell him what to do. Someone nice, this time.

Mike was a lot of things, but rarely nice, especially to Jay. 

“Man,” Mike said, holding up his hands. “Is this, like--” 

“It’s not anything,” Jay blurted. “Sorry. I’ll--”

He stood, uncertainly. Mike shook his head. 

“I mean-- Yes, take off your pants!” Mike said, gesturing at Jay with exasperation. “Who sleeps in jeans? You’ve got underwear on, right?”

Jay winced. He had to think about it, then pulled the waistband of his jeans back to double check.

“Yes,” he said, looking up. He felt dizzy, like the half beer he’d had had been half a bottle of vodka. “Boxers.”

“Great. I’m too goddamn tired to have sex, so.” 

Jay blinked at Mike, his hands on the thumbed open fly of his jeans. 

“I’m not here for that,” he said, with a bite of anger he hadn’t earned. Of course Mike would think that. Who wouldn’t?

“Good,” Mike said, also looking angry. 

They’d had sex once, when Jay was a twenty-two year old virgin and Mike offered to show him what sex was like. It had been good, and traumatic, in the sense that Jay was doing his best to not even think of himself as bi back then and felt like he didn’t know himself anymore after letting Mike have him like that. He’d bawled his eyes out alone after being rude to Mike to get rid of him. They’d never talked about it, and for a while didn’t even see each other, until Mike called Jay up years later asking if he needed a job, saying he was looking for someone who knew about VCRs. 

Jay climbed into Mike’s bed, wearing Mike’s massive shirt and his own boxer shorts, also his socks. He rolled over to face the wall, tucked his hands under his cheek, and listened to Mike sighing and shutting out the light in the adjoining bathroom, throwing the room into pure dark. There was one window, just over the bed on the wall Jay was facing, but the curtains were shut, and the moon was probably still blocked by clouds, anyway. 

Even Mike’s weight tilting the mattress felt good. Jay pinched his eyes shut tight and wrinkled his nose, telling himself to never do this again, even as he loved it like he loved all truly terrifying things: the heat of Mike’s body beside his, just close enough to radiate outward against Jay’s in the double bed, the way Mike kept sighing like Jay was killing him and like he’d never get to sleep, and the slightly sex-laced smell of Mike’s sheets, so different from that gross corn chip scent that lingered in the orgy house. 

“You’re shaking the mattress,” Mike said, muttering this into the dark as he rolled toward Jay, his gut coming to rest on the small of Jay’s back. “You’re so tense you’re vibrating.”

“I am not,” Jay said, hearing in his voice that Mike was right. His jaw was clenched. He exhaled and left his eyes closed when Mike settled in closer against his back, his hand coming to rest over the point of Jay’s hip under the blankets. 

“I know you’ll never tell me anything,” Mike said, mumbling this against the back of Jay’s head. “‘Cause you think I’m too dumb to understand your-- Depths.” 

“God!” Jay said, laughing for real and shifting back a bit, so that his bicep slid against Mike’s chest, encouraging him closer without really meaning to. Mike took the cue and curled his legs up behind Jay’s, laughed into his hair. “Depths,” Jay said. “Give me a fucking break.”

“How about you give me one. What’s going on with you? You don’t have to be specific. I don’t need to know the details. Probably don’t fuckin’ want to. Just tell me you’re okay. You look so sad all the time.”

“No, I don’t.” Jay stared up at the narrow gap below the curtains, where ambient light from the street lamps leaked through. “I’m not sad. I’m just. Managing my expectations.” 

“Well. Okay.” Mike huffed into Jay’s hair and shifted his hand under the blankets, letting it slip down to rest over Jay’s belly. Jay twitched in surprise, burrowing back against Mike a little more in the process. “Maybe they’re too low,” Mike said, mumbling this out like it could be a joke, if Jay wanted to play it that way.

“What?”

“Your expectations, Jay. What even are they?”

“In-- What sense?”

“What do you want out of life?” 

“This,” Jay said, without thinking about the fact that he was speaking literally: this, Mike warm and huge and pressed snugly to his back, talking to him late at night when he couldn’t sleep. “My life is great. I have everything I need. Am I disappointed sometimes that I didn’t try harder at-- Things? Sure, but that’s only because I didn’t really want them as much as I thought I did.”

Jay made himself shut up and rolled forward to hide his face in the pillow, his ass still bumped back against Mike’s thighs, which felt enormous like the rest of him. In almost fifteen years of carefully arranged sex with strangers Jay had never encountered anybody with a bigger dick, though it was possible Mike’s hugeness had just reached epic proportions in Jay’s unreliable memory, because he’d been a virgin when he took it and hadn’t gotten a glimpse of it since. 

Mike said nothing for a while, but Jay could feel that he was still wide awake, thinking. He was stroking Jay’s shoulder, his fingers sometimes sneaking up high enough to tickle over the skin on Jay’s throat before sliding back down again. 

“This is what I want, too,” Mike said. He snaked his arm across Jay’s chest and pulled him tight against his own, tucking him in. “I always thought, when Jay gets tired of being alone, he’ll just turn up on my doorstep and invite himself inside.” 

“That’s not--”

“I don’t mean now. I mean that’s what I used to think, when you ignored me for five years.”

“It wasn’t that long. I didn’t--”

“And then you never showed, so I had to call you up and beg you to take a shitty job, which was all I had to give you that you hadn’t already grabbed with both hands and run away with forever, and I didn’t think you’d say yes. But you did. Anyway, that’s my perspective, if you want it. G’night.”

Mike deflated against Jay’s back like that was it, like he’d spoken the magic words that would allow him to sleep for real. His arm was heavy over Jay’s side, wrapped diagonally across his chest with his hand clamped on Jay’s opposite shoulder. It was a possessive stronghold that didn’t allow for much movement, which was exactly what Jay wanted, which made his eyes burn a little. He drew his knees up high under the blanket and tucked his hands between his thighs. If he’d let Mike do this after that time they fucked, lots of things might have been different. Plenty of them might have been worse. As soon as they’d pulled apart Jay had seen Mike wanting to grab him and never let him go, his eyes full of savage monster mania that for Mike was probably what love looked like. Jay had been too young back then to not run away from that. He’d gone in daring Mike to try to scare him, and he bolted when it worked. 

Jay had a couple of bad dreams about that house in the country. He jerked out of them in his usual expert way, and every time it happened Mike mumbled that he was okay and pet his hair, still mostly asleep. Jay knew it was okay and didn’t need to be petted, but the heat of Mike’s puffy chest was too good not to cling to and bury his face in, so he let Mike have his delusion that he was calming Jay after his nightmares. 

After a while Jay slept so deeply that he didn’t even realize Mike had left the bed until he was climbing back into it, smelling of toothpaste. The sun was up in a gray, uninspiring fashion, dull morning light sneaking in from around the edges of the curtains as Mike gathered Jay up against him as if it was his right. Jay shifted gladly into his arms like it was. 

“You brushed your teeth?” Jay said, lifting his face toward Mike’s, his voice croaky in a way that made it sound like he was making fun of Mike for this. 

Mike shrugged and looked away, then back into Jay’s eyes. He had his hand on Jay’s waist under the blankets, and his knee was poking at Jay’s clenched together thighs like he expected them to part for him. 

“I thought you might want to be kissed or something,” Mike said, managing to hold Jay’s gaze while he said this, though it was visibly a struggle. 

“Well, mine’s still bad,” Jay said, meaning his breath. His eyelids felt so heavy, and he wanted to both kiss Mike and go back to sleep. 

“I don’t care, Jay,” Mike said, and an ancient, ghostlike pain jumped into his eyes, in a way that made it seem like he would die if Jay didn’t kiss him. 

“I still don’t know how to,” Jay said, and then he just pressed his lips to Mike’s, morning breath and all. 

They hadn’t kissed, that time they had sex. Jay had said he could learn that from someone else. He was preemptively mean to Mike back then, because he felt like belonging to Mike would be so easy that he wouldn’t ever become an interesting person or grow up or do anything if he let Mike have him just like that. 

Now, kissing Mike in his bed, he knew he’d never had a choice. He’d belonged to Mike anyway. They’d been friends for years before Mike suggested he could give Jay a sex lesson so that he wouldn’t virginally humiliate himself with whomever he actually cared to impress, and Jay had felt it every time their eyes met, already. It was the scariest and therefore most thrilling thing he’d ever experienced, and he’d been running from it for the equivalent of an entire slasher franchise with a dozen tired sequels, rebooted three times, each iteration weaker than the previous attempt. 

“God,” Jay said, groping for Mike’s dick when they’d been making out for a while and were both hard, grinding against each other. “I just wanna climb on,” he said, squeezing Mike through his boxers and trying to play it cool with his face on fire. “Can I?”

“Only if you don’t hate me after,” Mike said, already rolling over to get the lube from his bedstand drawer. 

“I didn’t--” Jay said, feeling terrible when their eyes met again. “I never hated you. I guess I hated myself, kinda.” 

“That’s worse. Don’t do that. Especially not for wanting my dick. That’s one of my favorite things about you, Jay.” 

Jay rolled his eyes and took the lube. He was still a little sore from the night before, but the flipside of that was that he was softened up enough to take Mike’s massive dick without the kind of comedy of errors their first time together had slowly amounted to. Jay’s groping had confirmed that he wasn’t misremembering Mike’s intimate dimensions.

“I’m not a kid anymore,” Jay said, pushing up onto his knees. He thought about taking off Mike’s thermal shirt, but then didn’t want to, and just shimmied out of his boxers instead, allowing Mike to stare openly at his dick. “You shouldn’t have trusted me,” he said when Mike dragged his gaze back up to his face. “Back then, like. Nobody deserved to put up with my shit less than you. I’m sorry.” 

“Hey,” Mike said. He looked a little choked up and astonished as he watched Jay flip open the lube. “What’ve I got to do to convince you I want to put up with your shit? Let you into my house in the middle of the night to organize my fucking DVDs? Spend my whole life sitting next to you like we’re waiting for the same bus and someday it’s gonna come? Let you ride my dick with this look on your face like you’re gonna murder me after?”

“I’m not gonna murder you. Take off your boxers.”

Mike obeyed with what looked to Jay like a swallowed whimper, like he didn’t believe the promise that he would survive this again. Jay got off on this and felt himself grinning as he slicked up Mike’s cock for his use, watching Mike’s eyelids flutter and his lips part around an exhale. Jay would need more than two hands to count the number of times Mike had called him evil to his face. It was weird that Jay felt like it was a proud destiny fulfilled when Mike said so, like somebody finally thought he was tough, and if it was Mike then it counted, it was real. He was pretty sure Mike could have been in love with the sweetest, mildest, most selfless person in the world and still think of them as evil, because he couldn’t love anybody without giving them complete power over him, and that kind of power corrupted a person, it couldn’t be helped. 

All of these half-awake revelations were nothing compared to how good it felt to sink down onto Mike’s cock. Jay moaned and let his head fall back, his hands braced on Mike’s heaving chest while he took it. He was so different from the trembling, buck-toothed beanpole he’d been last time they did this, and it felt so good: to be different, and for Mike to feel the same inside him, good enough to ruin him for everyone else. 

“Goddamn,” Mike said, his hands coming to Jay’s waist as he settled down fully with a grunt, with effort, because jesus Mike was thick at the base, insanely so. “Jay,” Mike said, sliding his hands up under the baggy shirt, over Jay’s ribs and back until he shivered, panting and not daring to move yet. 

“What?” Jay said, wiggling his hips just enough to make Mike moan and grab at him more tightly. 

“Nothing.” Mike dragged his hands back down to Jay’s thighs, which were spread open so wide around Mike’s barrel chest that Jay’s hips ached, and he hadn’t even started pumping up and down on the dick that was lodged impossibly deep inside him. He was grinning down at Mike, waiting for him to say something embarrassing, his nipples stiff inside the warm tent of Mike’s shirt. “Someone kissed your neck,” Mike said, blinking rapidly. 

Jay reached up to touch the bruise. He hadn’t noticed it before, in the state he was in, but now he remembered one guy from last night being a biter. 

“It’s weird,” Jay said. He started to roll his hips, impatient to be fucked hard. “I, ah. I ran away, after you and me-- And now that’s how I ended up coming back, like. This unfinished thing, like an ache. It was always in me, I mean-- In you.” 

Jay knew he wasn’t making any sense, and Mike looked like he might start crying, so he leaned down to kiss Mike on his scratchy chin instead of trying to continue explaining something he couldn’t really put words to even in his head. Mike whined, turned his lips into the kiss, and bucked his hips up sharply enough to make Jay moan and then laugh at himself for moaning like that. 

Mike barely lasted two minutes after Jay started really riding him. Jay stayed on his dick while he jacked himself, letting Mike watch, open-mouthed and oversensitive inside him, wincing at moments. When Jay started to come he pushed Mike’s t-shirt up so he could do it on Mike’s bare chest, and the noise he made as he fell over the hardest edge of his orgasm was mouse-like but triumphant, too. He fell forward while he was still emptying, so desperate to shove his shaky tongue into Mike’s mouth that he was surprised when Mike’s softened cock flopped out of him in the process. He felt so fucked open, and in such a perfectly nasty way, that it was like waking up back in his real body after having traveled outside it for a while. He groaned into the kiss and shivered all over, letting Mike roll him onto his back and clamber on top of him to pin him in place. 

They kissed and rubbed at each other lazily for a while, Jay drifting halfway back toward sleep in a way that he sensed Mike wasn’t. At one point he felt Mike stroking the bruise on his neck very softly, and he worried Mike was angsting about it, then that he’d find Jay disgusting if he knew where it came from. Mike leaned in to press just the ghost of a kiss there and Jay’s worries calmed, because it felt like he was trying to heal some old hurt, like this sore spot was a part of Jay and therefore Mike loved it. 

They stayed in bed until midday, when they were more hungry than reluctant to leave the warm cocoon of blankets. Jay let Mike make him blueberry muffins from a box mix, and he put real butter on the two Mike served him when they were done. 

“I’ll fix my diet after winter,” Mike said, helping himself to a third muffin while Jay got himself a second cup of coffee. “I was making s’mores last night,” he added, so gravely that Jay had to instruct himself not to laugh. “And I went to bed feeling shitty about that, and then the phone woke me up, and it was you.” 

“Your s’mores are nothing compared to what I was doing before I called,” Jay said, and he regretted it when Mike’s face fell, but he couldn’t hold in his giddy laughter any longer. “No, it’s okay,” he promised. “I’m just-- You’re right. We’re too old not to take better care of ourselves. Maybe I can help you with that. With the food stuff. And you can help me with, you know. My things.” 

Jay took a sip of his too hot coffee before glancing at Mike again. Mike hadn’t bitten into his third muffin yet and had his fists on the table, on either side of his plate, like he was restraining himself from asking: what things, Jay. 

“Yeah,” Mike said instead. “We’re good for each other, right? In the worst kind of way.” 

“Like when the monsters team up in a horror movie,” Jay said. He hoped Mike would understand what he meant, that with Mike on his side he felt powerful to a dangerous degree, like together they could take down the world and laugh about how easy it was. 

“You and your monsters,” Mike said. He popped the entire muffin into his mouth and chewed it in an exaggerated, disgusting, monsterish way that shouldn’t have been funny. 

Jay laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair, his stomach cramping up with it. 

After breakfast they got dressed and went shopping for a bookcase for Mike’s sci-fi DVDs. It was a frigid, overcast Sunday and most of Milwaukee seemed to be hibernating. Jay had lots of opinions on what would or wouldn’t look good in Mike’s living room, and on thrift store imperfections versus chain store prices. This seemed important in some weird way, as if the bookcase was Jay’s furniture, the first piece he was sneaking into Mike’s house. Mike seemed to care far less about ever making a decision at all, and kept resting his hand on the small of Jay’s back while they browsed. 

“I need some new gloves,” Jay said when they were at Target, ambling around in no hurry. Jay normally loathed shopping, but with Mike it was fun, just like the tedious days at the shop were always the best part of Jay’s week, as long as Mike was there. 

“Here,” Mike said, trailing Jay over to the glove display that had caught his eye. “How about these?”

“Jesus, no!” Jay said, snickering. Mike had made a beeline for some awful Star Wars mittens that had the Death Star on them. “Those are for children,” he said when Mike approached him with them. 

“You have the hands of a child, Jay. Here try ‘em on.” 

“Why? I’m not getting those.” 

“C’mon, look-- Gimme that.”

Mike took the Starbucks cup from Jay’s hand and set in on the floor near the glove display, which was gross. Jay sighed and held out his hands so Mike could slip one ugly mitten on, then the other. They were connected by a little piece of plastic, so Jay’s hands were effectively cuffed together, wrapped in wool and cupped inside Mike’s. 

“There,” Mike said, rubbing his thumbs over the back of Jay’s hands. “Perfect.” 

Jay made an exasperated sound and looked up into Mike’s face, ready to tell him to fuck off, but Mike’s eyes were too sweet and Jay’s lost gloves had felt too significant, last night when his hands were freezing all the way home. He still wasn’t going to buy Star Wars mittens, but he let Mike hold his hands like that for a bit longer, because he looked so pleased with himself, and had always seemed to enjoy dressing Jay in embarrassing things, or in his own clothes, or just in whatever he could. 

Jay thought of all the things he’d left behind by accident with people he would never see again: t-shirts, gloves, scarves, sweaters, his favorite jacket, multiple pairs of underwear, even socks. He stood there blushing in the middle of the aisle at Target, feeling like Mike was going to retrieve all that stuff for him one way or another, and like his days of losing little pieces of himself without meaning to were over.

**

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Theme Song 1: 
> 
> [Shut Up Kiss Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJS8sJFDSOg)
> 
> And I feel like I've linked both that one AND this one before on Mike/Jay fics adfjdoifjd, but this one is also an even bigger theme song for the fic <3:
> 
> [Nothing Without You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbqr3xKzI_0)


End file.
